Category Archives: Science and Technology

The World According to Mittal

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A post on Secular-Right India points us at a fantastic WSJ OpEd tracing the origins and rise of Lakshmi Mittal’s steel empire. Predictably, the WSJ loves Mr. Mittal –

A takeover of Arcelor would take Mr. Mittal a long way toward realizing his vision of a dominant global steelmaker in an industry for decades characterized, and brought low, by fragmentation. To pull it off, Mr. Mittal needs to break an Old World taboo against takeovers, hostile or otherwise, involving a company dear to Continental protectionists’ heart. That this task falls to a man born in Rajasthan, and raised in Calcutta, is one of the more delicious gifts of globalization.

Alas, the sentiment isn’t quite universal. Despite swashbuckling his way through the developing world and transforming almost overnight one of the oldest, stodgiest industries in the world, 3rd Way advocates appear tougher to tame. They hit back with words which will strike some SM’ers as rather racially-tinged –

Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the former French president, warned against giving into economic “laws of the jungle.” A former French finance minister referred to Mr. Mittal as “an Indian predator,” although his company is traded and based in Europe and he hasn’t lived in India for 30 years. Mr. Dollé, the Arcelor boss, said Rotterdam-based Mittal Steel is a “company full of Indians” that wants to buy his with “monnaie de singe.” The expression means “monopoly money”–Mittal’s offer is mostly shares–but the literal translation is “monkey money.” That double-entendre wasn’t lost on people.

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Double baggin’ it

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Shiladitya Sengupta was on the subway in Boston when he saw someone selling balloons that contained smaller balloons inside them. If you’ve seen one of those things, you’ll know what a hideous racket they can make when some young swine with a sharp object gets close to them. But instead of exhibiting the normal adult human reflex of covering up both ears in anticipation, Shiladitya dug into his roots and exhibited the normal desi reflex: He started thinking about work.

Sengupta, luckily for us, was a postdoctoral associate at one of the biology labs at MIT, and was part of a team that was working on a treatment for cancer. The double balloon thing eventually led his team to develop something called nanocell cancer treatment.

The January edition of India New England carries a profile of Sengupta, who was one of the five desis on TR35 – the list of top young technology innovators last year.

Sengupta, an assistant professor for Harvard Medical School and MIT, came to the United States in 2001 after receiving his doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is originally from New Delhi, India, and he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Sengupta now lives in Waltham, Mass., with his wife, Shivani, who also teaches at MIT.

What Sengupta developed for cancer treatment stems from the idea of a balloon within a balloon. One balloon carries a drug to shut down the blood supply, and the second, smaller balloon carries a drug to kill the cancer. [Link]

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How to befriend a vegetarian

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This anecdote about Google cofounder Sergey Brin is part of a startup PR launch, but it’s interesting. I wonder what the dare was. ‘I cook, you eat’ doesn’t sound like a very interesting bet:

The victim

[Anand] Rajaraman and Harinarayan were co-founders of Junglee, an early Web database company… In 1994, Rajaraman proudly told Brin he’d acquired a new computer with the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Brin… went over to Rajaraman’s apartment and installed Linux… on his computer…

Brin even took on Rajaraman’s practice of eating vegetarian, a family tradition. One evening, Brin went over to Rajaraman’s apartment, baked a fish in his oven, and served it to him with some lemon. Rajaraman ate it. [Link]

Tamarind once served me the lamb version of the paneer dish I ordered, two large, flat white squares. I downed the whole thing thinking it was the worst paneer I’d ever had and didn’t catch on until I saw the bill. Gross.

By the way, your bagels contain an extract from human hair and chicken feathers, your milk contains cattle hormones and pus, your beer was clarified with fish extract, your miso soup may contain fish broth and your Kiwi Strawberry Snapple is colored with a dye from ground beetles. Perfect recycling. I see some aren’t taking this meatitude lying down. Bon appetit!

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Making Sacrifices

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Back in 2003, NY Newsday published an article by reporter Dennis Duggan titled, The Growing Legion of Wounded. A reprint of the article can be found on this website. Here is an excerpt:

October 8, 2003

When a rocket propelled grenade struck his checkpoint in Northern Iraq on June 1, Sgt. Wasim Khan of Richmond Hill became part of an unheralded and growing legion of wounded.

When Khan, 27, of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, was struck by shrapnel, he was sent to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for five days before being transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington…

What makes Khan’s American soldier story even more compelling is that he is a Pakistani who dutifully practices his Muslim faith.

Khan has spent the last four months in Ward 57 at Walter Reed, where the maimed lie in limbo waiting for prostheses…

Khan told me over the phone Tuesday that he hopes to get a medical leave in the next few weeks. Departure from the ward is the dream of most of the soldiers who endure pain and humiliation as their wounds are swabbed, poked and scraped. Painkillers are often useless, and sometimes the doctors and nurses break into tears along with the patient who cries out in pain. [Link]

Sgt. Khan’s name re-surfaced in the press once again just last week. Guess where?

“Our men and women in uniform are making sacrifices,” said President George W. Bush during his State of the Union address Jan. 31, and listening intently from the balcony with First Lady Laura Bush was wounded-in-action Soldier Sgt. Wasim Khan.

Khan, a native of Gilgat, Pakistan, is a patient at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Khan was wounded in Iraq while serving with the 1st Armored Division. He was a special guest at the State of the Union, nominated to attend by the secretary of the Army.

“I got to meet both President Bush and Mrs. Bush after the Address,” said Khan. “They thanked me for my service and for coming and I told them it was an honor and a privilege to see them…” “It was wonderful to see how the American people support us, and keep up that support,” he said. “I hope they keep doing what they think is right for the country and right for the world. We have a lot of work ahead of us…” [Link]

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Math nerds needed. ASAP.

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The Washington Post reports on news that is music to my ears. Scientists AND “big business” are actually joining forces for a cause that they know to be important:

Business and science groups are reviving images of the Cold War space race in an effort to persuade lawmakers to spend millions to recruit and train high-caliber math teachers.

They argue that, just as a stronger focus on math helped the United States top the Soviet Sputnik launch by putting a man on the moon, the country needs to improve math education to win an economic race with China and India and a national security race against terrorism…

“The interesting sort of difference in the dynamic then and the dynamic now is that we were competing with a military threat, whereas now it’s much more an economic threat,” said Susan Traiman, an education and work force policy lobbyist for the Business Roundtable. [Link]

Many groups have been sounding this alarm bell for a while now, but nobody listens. From 2002:

The U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century warns, “The harsh fact is that the U.S. need for the highest quality human capital in science, mathematics, and engineering is not being met… We not only lack the homegrown science, technology, and engineering professionals necessary to ensure national prosperity and security, but also the next generation of teachers of science and math at the K-12 level… The nation is on the verge of a downward spiral in which current shortages will beget even more acute future shortages of high-quality professionals and competent teachers.”

According to the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), student science scores for grades 4 and 8 are flat and there has been a slight decline in scores for grade 12 since the assessment was last administered in 1996. Furthermore, 84 percent of science teachers and 86 percent of mathematics teachers in grades 5-8 did not major in science or mathematics. This report further underscores the need for reform and investment in math and science education, particularly at a time when our economy, national security and technological advances are heavily dependent on the quality of our future workforce. [Link]

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Are you a biased voter?

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Last January I posted a link to an online test that you can take, which supposedly reveals if you have even a subconscious racial bias. One of the researchers conducting the study was Harvard’s Mahzarin Banaji. Banaji and her colleagues have just revealed results from their latest set of experiments which, if true, corroborates what many of us have suspected about politics. I love a bit of controversy on a Monday. From the Washington Post:

The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly politically polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what drives these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs. anti-Iraq war; pro-same-sex marriage vs. anti-same-sex marriage. And they have begun to study political behavior using such specialized tools as sophisticated psychological tests and brain scans…

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified Democratic and Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate negative information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot inconsistency and hypocrisy — but only in candidates they opposed.

When presented with negative information about the candidates they liked, partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When the unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans showed that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats — the scans showed that “reward centers” in volunteers’ brains were activated. The psychologist observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information had curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward themselves for wrong-headed behavior.

Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes — subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.

Not so fast, say a few expected critics.

Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he disagreed with the study’s conclusions but that it was difficult to offer a detailed critique, as the research had not yet been published and he could not review the methodology. He also questioned whether the researchers themselves had implicit biases — against Republicans — noting that Nosek and Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji had given campaign contributions to Democrats.

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Good Blend of East and West

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Lunar / “Asian” New Years is always an occasion for me to reflect on how different South (brown) Asians are from East and Southeast (yellow) Asians. However, there is an area in which we, apparently, are a mix of both African/European and East Asian genotypes. The area in question is earwax:

Earwax comes in two types, wet and dry. The wet form predominates in Africa and Europe, where 97 percent or more of people have it, and the dry form among East Asians. The populations of South and Central Asia are roughly half and half. [Link]

This is evidence, apparently, of some yellow in the woodpile:

The dry form, the researchers say, presumably arose later in northern Asia, because they detected it almost universally in their tests of northern Han Chinese and Koreans. The dry form becomes less common in southern Asia, probably because the northerners with the dry earwax gene intermarried with southern Asians carrying the default wet earwax gene. [Link]

There must have been a lot of intermarriage if half the populations of South Asia have the East Asian gene. It turns out that the earwax gene is also related to that other, oh so polite topic of conversation, body odor:

Since it seems unlikely that having wet or dry earwax could have made much difference to an individual’s fitness, the earwax gene may have some other, more important function. Dr. Yoshiura and his colleagues suggest that the gene would have been favored because of its role in sweating. They write that earwax type and armpit odor are correlated, since populations with dry earwax, such as those of East Asia, tend to sweat less and have little or no body odor, while the wet earwax populations of Africa and Europe sweat more and so may have more body odor. [Link]

This would imply that half of all South Asians sweat little and have little B.O. Having recently ridden the Delhi metro, my question is … where are they ?

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Oooh, me so horny

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Meet one of California’s most recent Indian American residents. Her name is Lali and she weighs about 180 lbs. MSNBC reports:

A “darling girl” named Lali stuck close to her mom but greeted other adults with curiosity during her first public outing this week.

The two-month-old rare Indian rhinoceros made her debut at San Diego Zoo’s Wild Animal Park Thursday after spending her first eight weeks in a private enclosure to allow bonding time with her first-time mother, Gari.

“She immediately was exploring meeting the other Indian rhinos, but most of the time she kept close to mom,” said park spokeswoman Yadira Galindo.

Zoo officials are keeping mum as to whether or not Lali’s mom has already arranged for a suitable alliance with the family of a young male rhino for when Lali comes of age. The San Diego Zoo community has long since cracked down on the practice of dowries so we thankfully won’t have to worry about Lali selling her horn to raise money.

Am I the only one that didn’t know that India even had rhinos? I mean, I always hear about tigers in India (like many I’ve been on a tiger safari there), and everyone knows about the elephants, but I just can’t remember a time when I have heard about an encounter between Indian villagers and a rhino.

The Indian rhino formerly occurred from the foothills of the Hindu Kush in Pakistan, across the sub-Himalayan region, to the India-Myanmar border on the eastern edge of the Brahmaputra watershed. By the late 19th century, the Indian rhino had been eliminated from everywhere except the Chitwan Valley (Nepal), lowland Bhutan, the Teesta Valley (west Bengal, India) and the Brahmaputra Valley (Assam, India). For most of the 20th century, known populations have been concentrated in southern Nepal and northeastern India. [Link]

Of course, as with most megafauna, the Indian rhino’s days appear to be numbered.

Lali, which means “darling girl” in Hindi, is one of about 2,550 Indian rhinos in the world, 150 of which are in parks and zoos. The species is considered critically endangered because of human encroachment on its native habitats in India and Nepal and because the rhinos have been poached for their horns, which some believe have medicinal value.
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Spit, don’t swallow

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Chennai these days is littered with hoardings.The large ones have all been taken up by advertisements for saree stores and cell phones, and so the quirky ads have been relegated to occupying the small amount of space on top of bus shelters. Once such advertisement that is all over the city is for a brand of cooking oil, featuring a rather healthy looking film actress suggesting mysteriously that for a healthy life, people should practise oil-pulling. I was consumed by questions. Pulling oil? From where? Is it fun?

Unable to bear the anxiety, I asked my dad what in the world oil-pulling was and he handed me a magazine that featured a six page advertisement on the benefits of oil-pulling therapy. That’s right, therapy. And it is not fun.

The advertisement was not really an advertisement. It was a study on the benefits of oil-pulling commissioned by the oil manufacturer and conducted by a doctor who was featured on the front page of the spread. The results of the study can be summarized thus:

A group of people were asked to take a couple of teaspoons of pure, unadulterated sesame oil, and pour into into their respective mouths. After this, they were asked to swirl the oil in their mouths for a period of fifteen to twenty minutes. Care had to be taken to suck the oil through their teeth.

Eww. The ad continues.

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Bold billionaire still hungry

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What is it with desis and competitive eating? Lakshmi Mittal, the world’s third-richest man, launched a surprise bid today for his nearest steel industry rival:

While Bill Gates and Warren Buffett–numbers one and two on last year’s Forbes Billionaires list– engage in a genteel game of bridge, Lakshmi Mittal is ripping apart the world’s steel industry and reshaping it to his liking. This morning, his Mittal Steel… launched an audacious bid for Arcelor… Mittal Steel, the world’s first-largest steel maker, is seeking to pay 18.6 billion pounds ($22.7 billion) to buy the world’s second-largest producer. [Link]

By buying Arcelor, billionaire owner Lakshmi Mittal would control about 10 per cent of the global steel industry, more than three times as much as his closest rival. The purchase would be the biggest ever in the industry… creating a company with 320,000 employees and annual sales of more than $69 billion. Arcelor supplies steel to every second car in Europe… [Link]

… if successful, [the deal] would bring together the world’s number one and number two steelmakers and create the first producer capable of generating more than 100 tonnes of steel a day. [Link]

Mittal, who lives in London, floats Mittal Steel in the Netherlands and maintains Indian citizenship, has lost a couple of recent deals:

Mittal lost a relatively minor deal for a Czech steel mill to a Russian group, despite having the higher bid. And a foray outside steel into the world of oil ended in frustration when Mittal Steel’s joint bid with Indian oil company ONGC for PetroKazakhstan was topped by China National Petroleum Corp. [Link]

But his drive sounds very Roarkian:

He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky. [Link]

Azim Premji and the Ambanis clock in at numbers 38 and 60 on the Forbes list.

Related posts: World’s biggest steel company will be desi-owned, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and…, Forbes names India’s richest, Midnight’s oil

(Comments are off: every single comment last time was someone trying to hit Mittal up for a job or cash, or someone else flaming said lamers.)

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